One of my favorite authors is Joan Didion. Her writing is sharp and deep. And I credit her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, for helping me grieve after the loss of my mother. Her new book, Blue Nights, about the loss of her daughter is released today and I wanted to honor this brilliant writer by highlighting some of my favorite quotes. Each one is a meditation in and of itself. Do yourself a favor – go out a read one of her books.
The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. In my case this disordered thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from me, but it had been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant.
In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare.
That I was only beginning the process of mourning did not occur to me. Until now, I had only been able to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death.
You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.
Mary Anne